"Survive and survive and survive"

A friend and I had coffee this morning and talked about the limitations of language, the need to consider where words come from, what we think they mean, how they may be received by others. The words we use are critical, especially when we try to talk beyond the lines that often divide us. And then I came home and picked up Moon Tiger again. Here’s another sliver of Penelope Lively’s novel:

“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes -- our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorized Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.”